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Razor & LXDE-Qt Desktop Projects To Merge

07-21-2013, 11:50 AM

Phoronix: Razor & LXDE-Qt Desktop Projects To Merge

Developers behind the lightweight Qt-based Razor-qt and LXDE-Qt desktops met up at KDE's Akademy 2013 conference. During the annual KDE developer conference, the two lightweight desktops decided to merge their efforts around LXDE-Qt...

It's about damn time 2 DE groups join. This will really help reduce fragmentation, especially considering both LXDE and Razor-Qt had similar goals. I really hope the final product won't be called LXDE-Qt. Like really, that's a pretty dumb name, especially when you consider it'll be wayland compatible and at some day, possibly mir compatible. I'd be ok with them sticking with the Razor name.

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Or the LXDE name, which is the most likely since it has a lot more backing behind it. Still, with the direction LXDE has decided to go this is definitely the best option for both parties involved in the merger.

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This is beginning to look quite interesting! Thus far i've not been a user of LXDE-Qt or Razer, but those two merging with a goal of lean and fast is beginning to look very appealing! Certainly something to monitor and see where they end up.

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Personally, I found LXDE a usability nightmare ? mostly because of its broken .desktop file parser.

I didn't think it was that bad. If you just cut down the .desktop files to the bare minimum attributes and edit them by hand, its not so bad. I personally like LXDE because it doesn't really force you to use anything, so it's pretty easy to tweak it exactly as you like.

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If you just cut down the .desktop files to the bare minimum attributes and edit them by hand, its not so bad.

The error message I got was 'File " " could not be found' or something like that with the empty string between the quotation marks as my personal usability highlight.
BTW: LXDE's .desktop parser does neither mandate the .desktop file extension, nor does it mandate the Executable attribute, causing a grave security risk roughly equal to the .pif epidemic from a few years ago on Windows.

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That's really awesome news. I use Razor-qt on a netbook (which I just migrated from Mageia to Gentoo to get a bit of a speed boost), so this is some really relevant news. Both projects joining forces should help a whole lot. Also, if LXDE-qt is the new direction of LXDE, that's even better news: this move just eliminated 2 rather redundant DEs (LXDE, LXDE-qt, Razor-qt -> LXDE-qt) and made LXDE differentiate from XFCE.

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That's really awesome news. I use Razor-qt on a netbook (which I just migrated from Mageia to Gentoo to get a bit of a speed boost), so this is some really relevant news. Both projects joining forces should help a whole lot. Also, if LXDE-qt is the new direction of LXDE, that's even better news: this move just eliminated 2 rather redundant DEs (LXDE, LXDE-qt, Razor-qt -> LXDE-qt) and made LXDE differentiate from XFCE.

I completely agree, although I didn't find XFCE to be all that comparable to LXDE anyway. They both have names that are/will be obsolete, they're both GTK2 focused, and they're both on the light-weight side, but XFCE is considerably heavier than people think. XFCE has a noticeable performance hit on low-end devices compared to LXDE. I do, however, feel that XFCE makes a much better general-purpose DE. I wish it had more developers because I think it could easily be the best DE if it just got a little more attention.